Doggo-speak leaps off the Internet

Cuteness is entering everyday speech, particularly among the young and hip

“We got a doggo!” a Montreal writer and Concordia professor named Jon Paul Fiorentino tweeted two weeks ago, above a photo of a large white animal with its tongue hanging out. I would call this animal a dog, and I imagine most of you would too. But to a large number of people — especially the young or the hip — it’s now a doggo.

This is a fascinating example of Internet speech slipping into contemporary language, not just online but in streets and coffee shops and homes.

“Doggo” was — or still is — a British expression that means “in hiding” or “lying low.” The term was also familiar in the American South. In 1991, a Virginia journalist described Saddam Hussein’s military strategy in the Gulf War as “protecting his military assets and lying doggo” (I owe this reference to a piece by the late and great language columnist William Safire).

Yet English constantly reinvents itself. Today in North America, and perhaps in Britain too, the primary meaning of “doggo” is the domestic animal once known as man’s best friend.

Apart from their new identity as doggos, the friends in question are also called woofers, puppers or pupperinos. The suffix adds an element of cuteness — and this is a realm where cuteness is highly prized. The fur of doggos is flouffy, and the noise they make is a bork.

You may remember the “lolcat” phenomenon on the Internet in the early 2000s. It involved cute photos of cats and a short accompanying text littered with deliberate spelling mistakes. “LOL,” of course, stands for Laugh Out Loud. One crucial difference between lolcats and doggo-speak is that lolcats remained an Internet craze, whereas doggo-speak has made the leap into actual conversations.

Doggo-speak — also known as DoggoLingo — emerges from a meme. That’s a word invented by the biologist Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene. Dawkins defined it as “an idea, behaviour or style that spreads from person to person within a culture.” Pictures of cute-looking animals, ones that provoke young people to modify the language, fit Dawkins’s model.

Memes like this encourage their viewers to be verbally creative outside the formal confines of a classroom or a workplace. Cuteness is a quality that can be ascribed to almost any animal, and the names of other creatures are often altered too: People who talk about doggos are also likely to call rabbits “buns.”

One of the main sources of doggo-speak, a Facebook group named Dogspotting, has more than 543,000 members.

Last weekend an article on the CBC News website appeared under the headline “Cuteness Power: How ‘kawaii’ translates, melting hearts across cultures.” The word “kawaii” sounds like it should come from Honolulu, but in fact it’s a Japanese expression that can be used in English as both an adjective and a noun.

The Oxford English Dictionary explains it as “cute, especially in a manner considered characteristic of Japanese popular culture; charming, darling; ostentatiously adorable.” The first example (published in the New York Times) dates from 1965. I suspect that doggospeak and kawaii go hand in hand — paw in paw, I mean.

Kawaii developed in the aftermath of the terrifying devastation that Japan endured during the bombing raids of the Second World War. Doggo-speak has burgeoned in the United States and other English-speaking countries in the past few years.

We’re living in a dangerous time, and many people are profoundly scared. Yet the ugliness that infests so much of the Internet — the scorn, the hatred, the shouting, the aggression, the big-league lying — appears to have spawned a counter-movement, one that values old-fashioned concepts such as wholesomeness, and that treasures the innocence of play.

Language doesn’t have to be used as a weapon.

I only hope I’m not borking up the wrong tree.